Ministry
Twitch

This is a more or less emotional page. If you don't feel like reading useless nonsense, skip point one. If you already know who Ministry are, skip point two. If you're not interested in the review... oh well.

Part 1: The Memory

There was a time when Ministry enjoyed, for a certain period, the admiration of us fifteen-year-old metalheads.

“I mean, Ministry, not the Italian ones, the American ones with the ypsilon, are a group that kicks ass, they do metal with electronics but no, it's not electronic for jerks, they really rock, they use powerful guitars with electronics behind and they are super powerful! They're not like Marilyn Manson, who's a poser and appears on Emmtivvì, they're kind of like Rammstein but more powerful, and they don't sing in German that you don't understand,  but in English which you don't understand anyway, but it's known that their lyrics criticize Bush, they knew Bush was a loser already in the '90s, they write serious lyrics and they rock!”

Ministry was soon forgotten, precisely at the beginning of that age (sixteen and a half) that puts an end to the pseudo-adolescent aspirations of reducing oneself to a stereotype. And so, growing, you discover new genres: you start with a puff of prog, then begin to sniff funk or blues, and finally, you try to shoot up all possible genres intravenously, no longer in search of a chosen one but simply for fun, to broaden your horizons. Among these genres comes industrial, and with it, our beloved Ministry make themselves noticed again.

Part 2: The History

What we, as snotty kids, couldn't imagine was that Ministry, the almost thirty-year-old creation of the well-known heroin addict Al Jourgensen, started playing in 1981, releasing two years later With Sympathy, an album of modest quality that offered that plastic-sounding synthpop that was so fashionable then. The process that would lead them to become a not particularly remarkable industrial metal band instead consisted of a series of albums released at the end of the eighties of decisive importance for the development of industrial rock, and whose progressively increasing sonic heaviness led to the birth of the same industrial metal. A period of great fertility ended in 1992 with the very good Psalm 69, now almost entirely embracing metal sounds, passing through the excellent The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste (1989) and The Land of Rape and Honey (1988), distillates of technological alienation in which abrasive melodies and chilling samples united in an explosive mix of anger and protest. The progenitor of this period was the immediate successor to With Sympathy and one of Ministry's lesser-known albums, Twitch, from 1986.

Part 3: The Review

Not at all satisfied with his debut album, Al Jourgensen decided that pop was not exactly his path and began to undertake the aforementioned process of thematic and sonic hardening. In 1989, Nine Inch Nails would start making industrial appealing to a wider audience, something similar (the reverse, actually) Ministry did three years earlier with the release of Twitch. The detachment from pop is not yet total, but it's no longer pop. The percussion begins to become obsessive echoes clashing against a wall of dark synthesizers. Extremely interesting is the singing: we don't hear at all that shouted scream full of rage we would know from the immediately following albums, but a clean voice, sometimes hoarse, sometimes not, singing in a mocking yet serious manner. A deliberately grotesque parody of pop, this is "Twitch". A faux pop with dark sounds and themes adorned by a mocking but not at all cheerful voice. It seems indeed a fake joy that of "Just Like You" and "Over the Shoulder", perhaps the two catchiest tracks on the album. "The Angel" could have been the classic slow pop track for flirting, but the final result is something chilling and decidedly sad. Through the dark "We Believe" and "Isle of Man"" one arrives at the final "Crash and Burn" and "Twitch (version II)" with which one reaches the monstrous chaotic sounds that will be explored in the future. A separate case is the interesting "All Day (remix 3)", later removed in the 2003 reissue "Twitched", in which the old dance-pop sounds and the new dark ones coexist halfway.

An album worth listening to, in short, not a masterpiece but a transitional record that shines with its own light in the discography of one of the bands that made the history of industrial.